Administrator wrote:Excellent call on this one, Mitch. Do you do a lot of work in Unity? It's an amazing, righteous engine!

No I don't really have much experience with it I have used it when doing a class in game design and completed a small game using Unity. I do use it occasionally in one of my part time jobs where I work creating vehicle simulations and using vr. If I wasn't so busy I would like to use it more, I think it is great engine I may need to brush up my skills with it as a will be using it as part of a programming competition soon.

Mitch wrote:No I don't really have much experience with it I have used it when doing a class in game design and completed a small game using Unity. I do use it occasionally in one of my part time jobs where I work creating vehicle simulations and using vr. If I wasn't so busy I would like to use it more, I think it is great engine I may need to brush up my skills with it as a will be using it as part of a programming competition soon.

Dude, that is supremely awesome!! The vehicle simulations, are they serious games / training tools? I spent a bunch of time peripherally working with that kind of software, and that's probably the closest I've come to professional game development (unless you count TFR / Outer Colony).

If you'd like to share, what kind of programming competition will you be doing?

And what was the course in game design like? I'm always intrigued when I hear about courses like those, largely because I'd never seen anything quite like that in my own educational journey.

Man, and right now, the Outer Colony forums probably have just about the most talent-heavy user base I've ever seen. We've got multiple grad students / PhD candidates in hard sciences, Anachronic is a monster Unity dev, CzarQwerty is the chief software engineer who taught me most of what I know years ago, Imperator works multiple jobs concurrently while paying himself through undergrad, Brian's a serious composer with a heavy academic background, RP has an extensive educational background and runs a successful Twitch channel - it's kinda' unbelievable how many tremendously smart, talented people are on these boards.

They are two primary simulation one for research in managing traffic flow and environmental impact and one used by the universities formula student team and used in researching motion sickness in vr/Motion simulators.I work with a CKAS motion platform (YouTube) and the HTC vive (sometime the oculus rift). I am also allowed a lot of freedom to work with that equipment on my own as well as other stuff such as leap motion and other cool stuff.

Administrator wrote:If you'd like to share, what kind of programming competition will you be doing?

Administrator wrote:And what was the course in game design like? I'm always intrigued when I hear about courses like those, largely because I'd never seen anything quite like that in my own educational journey.

I actually meant to say I did a module in game design as part of my games programming course. Wasn't the most interesting module as I life long gamer I sort of knew most of the theory. Making GDD's it not really fun. Learning about monetization strategies was interesting but some of the methods presented I don't think I could use in a personal game they are too anti-consumer but when I look it all the largest profiting gaming giants are using these methods.

Administrator wrote:Man, and right now, the Outer Colony forums probably have just about the most talent-heavy user base I've ever seen. We've got multiple grad students / PhD candidates in hard sciences, Anachronic is a monster Unity dev, CzarQwerty is the chief software engineer who taught me most of what I know years ago, Imperator works multiple jobs concurrently while paying himself through undergrad, Brian's a serious composer with a heavy academic background, RP has an extensive educational background and runs a successful Twitch channel - it's kinda' unbelievable how many tremendously smart, talented people are on these boards.

Yes it is great to have but it is your great game that bring people of these talents together. Outer colonies is pushing the boundaries in many areas of game mechanics I personally stumbled across outer colonies when looking for information on human needs and socialization modelling for a personal project I was working on and one of your blog posts came up in google. At the time I was just skim reading this post and saw the screenshot of the game I looked at the title bar reading "The Far Reaches" and googled this game as it was like a dream project of mine. I didn't realise at the time but the post I was reading was actually on the games website (I originally thought it was a psychology blog or something haha) derp. Then I realised I had to keep following the progress of this game

Hahaha, you sound very much like me during my undergrad! Don't worry - everyone hates this sort of stuff in university, because it appears completely idiotic for the scope of projects that are built in the classroom setting. I totally hated design work, too, and I thought it completely stupid at the time.

I think that the further along most (competent) software engineers get in their careers, the more they have to work on huge (multi hundred thousand line) systems, and then realize that the design stage is what it's all about. The difference between elite talent and rank-and-file sorts of coders is the capacity to design. The nuts and bolts of coding - anybody can be trained to do that. Data structures, algorithms, and the capacity to translate business requirements into working software through rigorous design and effective implementation - that's what it's all about.

The best analogy I've heard comes from the construction industry. In my experience, the work of coding a system is a bit like being a construction worker. It's putting the nuts and bolts and boards in place. The work of design, however, is the like that of an architect. This is where the hard choices are made, and this is where the abstract vision is transformed into something actionable, something concrete. Just like how most people could learn to be a construction worker, so, too, could most people learn to be coders. Not as many people, though, can learn to be architects. That's the hard skill.

The 22 year old version of myself would've scoffed at that notion, and I really didn't believe it as I wrapped up my undergrad. Most of that is because of the abysmal way computer science education is conducted, at least in the US. Students are trained in the flat-out wrong way to write software, and that's expressed in the utterly abysmal, unsound systems you find most "professionals" creating in the real world. I feel like writing a ton about this, but I'm starving for dinner, so I'll try to limit the length of this post.

Learning about monetization strategies was interesting but some of the methods presented I don't think I could use in a personal game they are too anti-consumer but when I look it all the largest profiting gaming giants are using these methods.

Oh man, this is another fascinating topic that I want to write so, so, so much about...my stomach is growling, so I'll hold off on sharing all my thoughts here, but as a consumer, I find myself absolutely avoiding games that I think have unacceptable monetization policies.

As somebody who's formally studied the subject, what do you think about microtransactions and pay-to-win setups?

Outer colonies is pushing the boundaries in many areas of game mechanics I personally stumbled across outer colonies when looking for information on human needs and socialization modelling for a personal project I was working on and one of your blog posts came up in google. At the time I was just skim reading this post and saw the screenshot of the game I looked at the title bar reading "The Far Reaches" and googled this game as it was like a dream project of mine. I didn't realise at the time but the post I was reading was actually on the games website (I originally thought it was a psychology blog or something haha) derp.

Hahaha, that's hilarious, man! I've actually had other people find the game in precisely this way. I sometimes worry that my approach to design is too academic, too sterile, perhaps, and that it lacks visceral appeal as such.

I've been working hard lately to make everything more palatable, more engaging to end users, so that more players outside the comp-sci realm can enjoy and experience the content. I'm really, really relieved, though, to hear that you found Outer Colony in this way, and that you're digging it. At the end of the day, I'm generally designing the game that I really want to play, and to hear that it's appealing to other characters like me gives me some hope that a target market might exist for this thing!

I really wish you good luck in this competition, too, and I think you're taking a great approach to working in the games industry. In fact, you've probably got a better shot at a successful career in this than I do, haha! But those hard CS skills will serve you wherever you go (especially in game development), and whether a person has the formal background or not, dedication to the central tenets of the craft is what makes for an elite engineer. In my experience, games are software. Oh, it's a very specialized domain, with a very specialized and additional set of principles that govern it, but at its core, it's no different from a high fidelity weather simulator or a billion-record insurance system.

Each software domain comes with its own elaborate set of knowledge and calls for its own set of related talents, but every one of them, at their very core, are just a matter of data structures and algorithms. I can tell from talking to you here that you've got the right mindset to kick ass in building any sort of system. Dominate that competition, man - I'm positive you can!